CUACE/Dust, an operational mesoscale sand and dust storm (SDS) forecasting
system for East Asia, has been developed by online coupling a dust aerosol
emission scheme and dust aerosol microphysics onto a regional meteorological
model with improved advection and diffusion schemes and a detailed Northeast
Asia soil erosion database. With improved initial dust aerosol conditions
through a 3-DVar data assimilation system, CUACE/Dust successfully forecasted
most of the 31 SDS processes in East Asia. A detailed comparison of the
model predictions for the 8&ndash;12 March SDS process with surface network
observations and lidar measurements revealed a robust forecasting ability of
the system. The time series of the operationally forecasted dust
concentrations for a number of representative stations for the whole spring
2006 (1 March&ndash;31 May) were evaluated against surface PM10 monitoring data,
showing a good agreement in terms of the SDS timing and magnitudes at and
near the source regions where dust aerosols dominate. For the operational
forecasts of spring 2006 in East Asia, a TS (threat score) system evaluated
the performance of CUACE/Dust against all available observations and
rendered a spring averaged TS value of 0.31 for FT1 (24 h forecasts), 0.23
for FT2 (48 h forecasts) and 0.21 for FT3 (72 h forecasts).